Previous versions ran on the OPML Editor which I’ve been having a harder and harder time keeping alive. So I was very happy to see River4 was a Node.js app.

The only issue is that step 4 of his instructions says:

Launch river4.js on a node.js system.

If you’ve never done this before it’s somewhat vexing. Dave has some links to resources about Heroku, but I have a Linux server sitting in my basement that I wanted to use, so how should I keep the app running as a long term service?

After some digging I found the glorious app forever which is “A simple CLI tool for ensuring that a given script runs continuously (i.e. forever).”

Installing and using it was very easy. After following steps 1-3 from the River4 repo I ran:

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git clonehttps://github.com/scripting/river4 /var/www/river4

sudo npm install forever-g

cd/var/www/river4

forever start river4.js

This will launch River4 as a background process, keep an eye on it and restart it if it crashes. Then I finished the rest of the steps 5-8.